I think one of the hardest things for me to grasp when I first got clean and sober was how long it was going to take for me to feel like I was normal and, after that, how long it was going to be before I felt like I was (sort of) mentally healthy. While I was drinking, knowing full well that I was an alcoholic and drug addict, I thought if I could just put down the booze and the rest of the toys, voilà, I would magically start doing all the awesome stuff that my addictive behaviors had prevented me from doing and I’d soon become the super being that I always knew I was.
Man, was I wrong.
One of the hard lessons that I have learned in recovery is that contrary to what some people think, particularly those outside of recovery, this shit takes time. And if you drank and drugged as long as me, it takes a lot of time. Time does matter in sobriety—or more accurately, time spent in actual recovery, not just racking up months and years laying off substances. AA even has a cute little acronym for it: TIME (Things I Must Earn). While there are plenty of people with a bunch of years in AA who don’t really have much in the way of recovery, I’ve noticed that, conversely, there aren’t many people who have the kind of recovery that I would like to have who don’t also have a significant number of years.
I’m not talking about material stuff that we get when we stay sober and get an awesome job or the validation that comes when you go back to school or run a marathon. I’m also not talking about the faux serenity that 25-year-old yoga instructors who quote the Tao and wear “Free Tibet” t-shirts affect. What I mean is that kind of deeply ingrained calmness of spirit that you see in certain old-timers and genuinely spiritual people who know that whatever happens—no matter how fucked up or unfair—that they’re going to be alright. Or as one of my friends in recovery says, “Somebody has to be the happiest guy in the cancer ward, and I want it to be me.” I know addicts (and Americans in general) want what they want when they want it but, unfortunately, I don’t think there are any shortcuts to this stuff.
I’ve been in recovery long enough to know that I’m not really as well as I like to believe that I am sometimes. I remember an old-timer said to me when I first came into AA, “Stick around kid, and you’ll find out how sick you really are.” So I humored him and called him a dick under my breath, but then I stuck around and found out that he was telling the truth, even if I didn’t want to hear it. Like they say, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
It’s been my experience that no matter how much recovery work I do (meetings, steps, service, outside help) that it’s still going to take a long time before I’m legitimately cool with myself and the world around me. And for someone who was in active addiction as long as me, that shouldn’t be too surprising. Don’t get me wrong, my life was a billion times better not long after I put down the booze and drugs, but it didn’t mean I was whole. No sobriety fairy tapped me on the head with a magic wand when I got my five or 10 year coin and said, “I now pronounce you well.”
Someone explained to me once that like sports and creative stuff, no matter how much natural talent I have in anything, I’m still going to have to practice it over an extended period of time in order to be any good at it. And for me, learning and practicing how to not only live my life without booze and drugs (or some other kind of escape mechanism)—and doing it without being scared shitless of the many things I wasn’t even aware of—has taken a lot of time.
I first picked up a drink at 14, became a daily drinker and weed smoker at 18, and added a ton of coke and pills to the mix after I hit my mid-20s. I got sober right after I turned 47, but by then I was close to having “wet brain” (according to my doctor), so I was a physical mess for a long time. I’ve been sober for 11 years now, but with all that time being fucked up, plus the absolute failure to grow up emotionally past the age of a 14-year-old, it’s not realistic that I could be all that “recovered” (a past tense word that I hate when I read it in the Big Book), even though I’m light years ahead of where I was at the end of my drinking.
I remember when I was about 90 days sober, I thought to myself, “Okay, I’m good now.” Then when I was six months sober, I looked back at myself at 90 days and realized, “Yeah, I was a mess then, but now I’m cool.” It took a couple of years before I realized that I was going to be crazy for a while. One of the turning points came when I was two years sober. I was going to get my two year medallion and I felt awful about everything, mostly because I thought I should be all better by then. I didn’t know what I was going to say when they handed me my medallion at my home group.
But right before I left my house to go to the meeting, I kicked over a pile of newspapers. It was a week or so after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, and the headline of the Boston Globe read, “Recovery to Take Years.” That’s when I realized that my recovery really was going to be a long process.
When I was four years sober, I got separated and then divorced from my wife of 11 years. That’s when I earned the name “Angry Johnny” because I was out of my mind with rage for a couple of years. Just as I was recovering from that, my brother drank himself to death and, right after that, my mother had to go to a nursing home at 72 because of Alzheimer’s. A year later, I broke my leg a week after my car died, and I went completely broke. I’ve been dumped (thankfully) and I’ve been fired from a job, too.
But even though all of those things sucked, not only did I not drink or take drugs, but I actually went through them sober and practiced how to live my life in reality. Because that shit happens to everyone. But I couldn’t have learned how to do any of that from a book, and I had to go through each one of those little horror shows and learn from them in order to grow up a little.
I have to admit that I’m still pretty fucked up sometimes, although I’m a lot less fucked up than I used to be. Recovery, like alcoholism, is progressive. But only if I keep doing it.
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